HAITI'S REVIVAL: HARD TRUTHS CONFRONT HIGH HOPES

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti A few days after the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods.

At the time, Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “Return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool.

LOFTY AMBITIONS

This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent – and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent – rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.

“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?' ” said Michele Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, `Most everything went wrong.' There needs to be some accountability for all that money.”

Meanwhile, “Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.

Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors.

DISASTER AS CATALYST

After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world's ineffectual strategies for helping it.

Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”

But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that Bill Clinton co-chaired.

Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed – as calculated by Bill Clinton's U.N.office and by the Times – disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects languished.

HOUSING PROJECTS

That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.

The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for Port-au-Prince. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed.

“Building takes time; it's destruction that's rapid,” President Michel Martelly said at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for a new teaching hospital

In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country's largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Hillary Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul

“It's not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruiperez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti.

BUREAUCRATIC PARALYSIS

Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti's water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it so far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools, but only one has been completed.

In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems.

The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall.

But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards.

How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted.

Andre Paultre and Damon Winter of the New York Times contributed reporting.

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